Terry Kelley

I use the crap out of V-Vocal when it works. I also love it's pitch to midi function. I haven't used Melodyne but many people swear by it. I agree that Melodyne is pricey for what it does but it could just be that I am cheap. V-Vocal has issues (for over a decade) with no clear resolution in sight. People have suggested many, many "fixes" but I think they work out of randomness. I get the C000000005 (memory violation) crash in both Cronus (mostly) and VpEnc (occasionally). I've tried a lot of different things to isolate the cause without any success. On the other hand, there are people that NEVER have a problem with it. I suspect they don't load up a project like I do. Updating or rolling back DirectX never fixed it. You just have to check periodically if it's working. I've learned to: 1. Use it only on very short clips. Under 10 seconds if possible. 2. Render the clip immediately after editing and save the file. 3. Don't leave any clips open in V-Vocal unless you are editing them at the moment. Either remove the region or render it. 4. Don't try to have more than one editor open at a time. Sometimes this work but often I get an empty editor (no wave in it.) 5. If you start getting the empty editor: a. Look for a clip that still has a region open for it. b. Bounce a mono clip to stereo and then back to mono, bounce it to a clip and try creating the region again. If you have a stereo clip, but try bouncing to a clip (which really doesn't nothing if only one clip is selected from what I can tell.) I have no idea why this works. It too could be V-Vocal randomness at work. c. Some people have claimed V-Vocal needs a high amplitude wave to work. Maybe so but I've never seen this and increasing the gain (or normalizing) never fixes any V-Vocal issues. 6. If V-Vocal starts crashing, I copy the clip to a new project and edit it there then copy it back. This implies that V-Vocal's place in memory is at risk as more things get added to a project (like effects, VSTs, waves, etc.) Restarting Cakewalk and/or rebooting never fixes anything. Here's an interesting read from nearly 15 years ago. http://forum.cakewalk.com/V-Vocal-clips-m855325.aspx

Ah! I didn't know that but yeah, you don't apply "cronus" to something. If you do a search on V-Vocal issues over the years, this is one some people suggested. Sounds like it's not the issue.

First, confirm that Cronus is not excluded in the plugin manager. Its a DXi plugin so look at each DXi group and click on Show Excluded. If it is, remove that exclusion. Is there any chance the song was saved with an open region? If so, remove any existing regions. Are you trying to open a clip longer than around ten seconds? Try a shorter clip. V-Vocal is well known for being unreliable and one day it will start working with no indication of why.

I was a tad higher, like 3600's.

No problem. Finding a good VST for the guitar would be interesting. Let me know what you find.

The surf sound was primarily a Fender guitar and a spring reverb. Fender Jaguars and Stratocasters were very popular followed by Telecasters and Jazzmasters. Any Fender derivative VST will work for that although playing a real guitar is best. Add in the spring reverb into any Fender style amp/cabinet will do it. Actually, just about any amp/cabinet will work if the sound is kept fairly clean. The key is the Fender guitar sound and spring reverb. Both the TTS-1 and Munt MT-32 have guitar sounds that are very Fender. I did it with my Casio MG510 Midi/Stratocaster guitar and TH3 using the AQTX spring reverb and Dark Face amp. I used the guitar analog pickups, not the midi. The guitar is a decent Stratocaster copy.

Lol, well of course.

Every time I use V-Vocal on a clip, it appends "V-Vocal" to the clip name. After five times it's <V-Vocal><V-Vocal><V-Vocal><V-Vocal><V-Vocal>. I don't know if this is a bug or feature (or if you can't fix it, feature it!) Is this normal? I am surprised that V-Vocal started working again after the 11/2020 build for some reason. Haven't seen a Cronus crash yet. But I still tempt fate!

But no matter how much you change it, it's still dark. This is one item I would like changed. I would love the ability to essentially invert the look to be similar to the Cakewalk for Windows theme.

I still have my DOS and C4W 1.0 disks.

A buddy and I use My Drive to send bundles back and forth. One thing I've noticed lately, when I download a bundle from My Drive, the file type is set to "wave" even though the extension is .cwb. I can load it into Cakewalk but it doesn't show up as available unless I change the file open filter to *.*. Weird.

If I want to manually enter something and miss hitting enter, those shortcut keys make Cakewalk explode all over itself and I have no idea how much stuff I've trigger just typing the word "Lead".

Did you check the shortcut list?t? Edit: Someone pointed out it's "e" on the keyboard. I always click the button in the control panel. Does that do what you want?

When I've done it, I filter the midi down to one instrument, freeze it, copy the audio to a new track and filter again for the next instrument. Repeat until you have what you want. Other ways seem to take more steps to get from midi data to audio. I have also set up EZ Drummer to output to separate channels/tracks (16 if you pick stereo) and freeze those tracks.

I second Nigel's point about adding TTS-1 the first thing in a project. Adding it later is likely to be futile. Same for V-Vocal. Use it early because at some point it will crash Cakewalk (usually Cronus.dll.)

Ask questions in any language. We'll figure it out.

Oh god, we'll never hear the end of this ...

I use Xpand! a lot. It's got some great balls-to-the-wall pads among other things. I too grabbed the expansion pack and never noticed it's all in the X86 folder. I thought Xpand! was 64-bit. Maybe the preset location is legacy (where it was when it was 32 bit.) Also, has anyone found a keyboard stroke to step through the presets? I noticed +/- or any arrow keys will not do it. Regardless, I love this instrument.

Didn't early Cakewalk have this? I need to fire up C4W 1.0. I don't think CW DOS did.

That's totally unfair!

I could see setting the key myself (like G) and having it as a reference for any global key shifts. So if I do a global transpose up or down, it would change accordingly, Of course I'd have to know the key in the first place which I don't often. All white keys - it must be C. Oh, one black key, that's um, er, ah ... I wouldn't expect Cakewalk to figure it out.

Hi Murat, I do see that but it's still an instrument track. As you pointed out, any change disrupts the midi section. As you suggested, I too just copy the audio data out to a new audio track. Extra step but not a deal breaker. The OP was suggesting (as I read it) that the freeze would essentially change the track from instrument to audio. Alas, I am not sure why I am invested in the topic at this point, LOL! It's certainly a feature worth investigating.

Maybe what we want is for it to create a new wave track at the same time? I don't understand how an instrument track and wave track can be the same thing at the same time when they are different things.

And samplers.

As for samplers, TX16Wx has been pretty nice.